Surge Pricing for Grandma: Hailing Seniors for Call Centers

In a world of Uber and Amazon like concepts, our view of how we match supply and demand these days has changed. Technology advancements have improved the way we can pool risk and increase the speed at which we get market thickness. It is with these concepts in mind that we thought about how we can address different problems in a similar manner.

 

Currently, in Peru there is a trend to employ younger people rather than older people. This results in many 50 to 65-year-old people losing their employment or filing for early retirement. Based on numbers statistics provided by the INEI (Statistics Institute of Peru), it is expected that by 2020 there will be around 44,000 people between 50 and 65 years unemployed in the capital city, Lima. While many people see this is as a benefit, not all these seniors are happy being retired. Many of them earn a pension that is not enough to cover their needs or allow them to contribute to their family, which forces them to work informally under bad conditions. Although this is not necessarily an industry focused problem, it is most definitely a growing concern in society that spreads across all industries. Additionally, because these people are technically still under the retirement age, the government and companies do not take them into consideration when proposing new initiatives or policies to improve labor availability and conditions. Given SDG number 8 to “promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all”, we think it is time to make a change.

 

LlamaVida is a call center that aims to provide part-time jobs to seniors. This new business model creates social impact by allowing seniors to continue contributing to society as professionals with decent pay and more flexible working conditions both in terms of work schedule and the ability to work remotely. We focus on call centers for claims solutions because that’s where we consider seniors can have the most impact and because the metrics they would be measured by would not be as stressful as in Sales. We believe that this innovation would be game-changing because on the demand side there is currently unmet demand for call center operators in Latin America and on the supply side most call centers do not have enough employees to meet that demand as they have high turnover rates. We are increasing the supply of call center operators by reintroducing senior people into the labor force. At the same time, we will be providing seniors with decent work that adapts to their needs (flexible times and not requiring mobility). The idea is to install a very intuitive software on their home computers so that they can show themselves as available and take a call.

 

The main costs to be incurred with this innovation are: training, technology and business development. Additionally, the main risks would be in recruitment and training, message communication, achieving market thickness through business development and fighting informality. To mitigate these risks, we have come up with some ideas:

·       Recruitment & Training: Ideally, we will source the first operators through friends and family in Peru for a pilot and after we will put announcements in the newspapers that the seniors read. We will invest in training each of the Senior Ops in person. A trainer will go to the call operators’ home, install the program to take the calls and train the senior.

·       Message communication: It should be made clear in our message that this service is optional and that all the call operators join willingly and work the hours they can provide. Additionally, we would make clears that the message outside the company will emphasize that the company is filling the gap of call center operators, not decreasing the supply of jobs for “young people”.

·       Business development: We will hire a business development manager who will search for the necessary clients for this job. Our client target would be telcos, since they usually require many call center operators.

·       Informality: We would offer standard contracts that set an upper limit of month working hours and rewards for long-term commitment. Originally, all of our workers will be under an hourly basis type of contract.

 

Ideally after successfully running the model in Peru, we plan to target other markets in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Beyond allowing us to reach more seniors, this would allow us to provide greater network density by pooling of operators across the regions, which means greater probability to match supply and demand and introduces the benefits of working across different time zones to further increase coverage. There are also some ideas of expanding the model to include single mothers or people with disabilities who could also benefit from having a part-time job. We will reconsider these ideas after running the initial tests of the pilot to see whether that population could be included before executing a geographical expansion or whether it should come at a later stage.

 

There are not many potentially negative social impacts associated with this business model because the jobs the senior operators will be taking are jobs that were vacant before. We therefore assume that we would not be displacing current employment, but rather increasing overall employment while helping companies meet their demand more easily. One of the risks that we may have to address is if companies don’t use our services and hire seniors under worse conditions directly, which could result in exploitation of seniors who are unaware of better alternatives.

Authors: Julie Bodenmann, Anais Cisneros, Mauro Guercia